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- [00:02]
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- [01:07]
Jack Wagner
Welcome to Other World. I'm your host Jack Wagner. This episode centers around a guy named David and an experience he had while camping as a teenager. He's a software engineer and also a musician living in the Bay Area. I met David a while ago and ever since he first told me this story, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And I've always wanted to explore certain aspects of his experience in more detail. Eventually I got the chance to do just that. In fact, after recording this interview, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole for a couple months on this topic, but I don't want to get ahead of myself with that. David had this experience when he was in high school out in Ojai, California, which is a beautiful place, an excellent place for camping, which is exactly what David and his friends were doing when they ended up encountering something very strange. I don't want to spoil anything, but what stuck out to me with this experience is that I'm used to people talking about seeing things that they can't comprehend. In this case, David not only saw something, he also heard something that he couldn't comprehend. This is episode 122. The title is the Hum Over Ojai and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello, is this Bobby?
- [02:41]
David
Yes, it is. At its core, the science you can't argue with.
- [02:45]
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All of a sudden up in the sky.
- [02:47]
Jack Wagner
It's almost frustrating that it's happening.
- [02:48]
David
I'm literally I'm going to die. Its limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. My name's Dave. I live in the Bay Area. I just work as a software engineer up here, just in like the local tech, you know, hemisphere. I Am actually from Southern California and, you know, grew up. I had a very normal childhood, you know, had really no experiences in any sort of paranormal activity. Grew up just kind of vaguely believing in this stuff and never really thinking that it would actually come to fruition or that I would ever really experience anything like this. But that all changed when in the summer of 2013, in between my sophomore and junior year of high school, me and my group of guy friends wanted to do, like, a little weekend getaway camping trip to Ojai, California. We were working little odd end summer jobs, and so we were accruing, like, a little bit of money and allowances. So we wanted to kind of have that taste of freedom and like, oh, let's go on a trip all together. And we wanted to do a camping trip. And so we looked at some of the. The local places, like El Capitan Ranch on the coast, like central coast, and these kind of boutique, you know, camping experiences that are like a few hundred dollars a night. So we said, you know, screw that. We're just going to find the cheapest campsite that we can find, which was this place called Wheeler Gorge in Ohio. And it cost, like $40 a night. So between our group of eight guys, we just, like, pulled together some money. It was about the most that we could afford at the time. These were all, like, my best guy friends, you know, they're even now. Some of them were like, you know, groomsmen in my wedding. So it's my friends Zach and Diego. Those are like my best friends. They both played football with me, and they were. I wouldn't really call them tough, but they were certain. Like, I'm definitely more on the softer side. And they were the guys that kind of brought me out of my, you know, shy, like, sensitive shell and really kind of kind of be bros with me. There was Diego's brother, who's this very, like, stoic guy. And there was two other guys. One guy, we don't really keep in touch with him. His name is Daniel, but he was a devoted, like, sober guy. Like, didn't drink whatsoever. Like, this guy was dead sober the entire time. And then there was two other guys, guy named Al and Brian. They were in our friend group at the time as well. So we set out, we load up my. My old Toyota truck with all of the supplies. We had, like, I think two racks of beer, and we got, like, you know, a bunch of hot dogs, you know, typical, like, teenage boy cuisine and whatnot. And we drove out. It was like in the summer, so it Was like super, super hot in Ohio. It was like 90 to 100 degrees, super dry. Barely any sun coverage at the campground. Barely any people at the campground too. It's just like this, you know, your typical campground, you know, supervisor guy that lives on premise. And he just came up to us and was like, hey, guys, you know, I basically called our bluff. Was like, I know you guys have alcohol. I know you guys are underage. It's cool, I won't bother you. Just like, don't burn down the forest and we'll be so it was. We were definitely left to our own devices. And it was just so, so remote out there. And Wheeler Gorge is about 30 minutes inland from Ojai, so it's even deeper into the mountains and even more remote. You know, one of those places where you lose service about 20 minutes away from the campsite, and it's just kind of a dead zone. So the first day we were there, you know, nothing too crazy, you know, we just played beer pong for like five hours or so. Just hung out, you know, typical camping stuff. We all shared this one big family sized tent that my buddy Zach had brought. So we're all kind of sardined next to each other, side by side. And because it was so hot, we also slept without the tarp on top of the tent just because there's no moisture. We wanted to be able to see the stars and the whole sky because it was so remote. There was no light pollution, so we were able to do that. There was tons of raccoons, though. So the raccoons were just completely shredding through our garbage the entire night. So I remember being kept up. By then, my buddy Brian had snuck in a bag of hot Cheetos into the tent for like a little late night snack. And anybody that's ever been camping knows that you don't keep any food in the tent just for that reason. So the first night, we actually got woke up by a family of raccoons. We breaking into our tent and undoing the zipper and like climbing all over us. So, yeah, it was just funny, all the commotion of that. You know how people say, like, oh, raccoons have hands, they actually have, like, little hands. I felt one, like, step on my thigh and I felt like it was almost just like a shrunken human hand just pressed onto my thigh. So we woke up the next day, you know, had some breakfast, just kind of shook off the night before. I think we ended up going on a hike or at least trying to. It was so hot that we couldn't actually really go up on the mountain. And I'm kind of glad that we did not because I'm sure we probably didn't have the necessary supplies. We were all kind of worn out from like, the, you know, the festivities of the day before. So kind of took it a little bit easier. Just listened to music. I think at one point we actually went into town just to get more supplies. Really just hung out and just chatted and goofed off like we normally did. But just, you know, camping, I was feeling pretty tired and just kind of over the festivities. So I just decided to take it easy and just help out making dinner and make some s' mores and whatnot and just kind of have a quieter evening in preparation of going home the next day. So we all went to bed pretty early, around like 10 or 11 or so. I was pretty much smack dab in the middle of the tent, just so I had a pretty clear view looking up into the sky. I recall not being obstructed by any sort of trees or even like barely even like the tent poles or what not. So I had a pretty clear view of everything. We learned our lesson from the previous night. We got rid of all the food out of the tent. We hung up our garbage bags on a nearby tree to get them out of reach for the critters and whatnot. So around 1 or 2 in the morning, I hear more commotion or I wake up to my. My friend. I forget who. I think it was like my Diego's brother or something, like, yelling like, what the fuck is that? Like, what is that? And my initial thought is like, Brian brought more hot Cheetos into the tent. And something else like a coyote got into the tent. So I woke up disgruntled. But when I actually became conscious, I just. I realized, like, what was actually happening. My sight and hearing are like, the first to come. And I'm like, curled up in my sleeping bag, so I couldn't really see. But I remember hearing this really, really loud humming frequency. Like just this noise just ringing in my head. And one thing that I recall about this was that it wasn't like a loud volume like you'd hear at like, a concert or whatnot. Like an artificially loud volume. It was like my entire body and skeleton was just resonating with this frequency. It was incredibly loud. It was so loud, it was inescapable. You couldn't plug your ears to get away from it. But it wasn't like a splitting, like, overly loud concert sound. Like, I'm a musician, I play live all the time. Our band, being in a metal band were pretty loud. And so, you know, we ear protection, because otherwise it's just like that super loud splitting, you know, ear ringing volume. But this didn't really have the same characteristics. This was something that, like, permeated my skull. Like, I'd almost hear, like my teeth rattling in my head. And it was just inescapable, this loud, just humming noise. You could try to plug your ears with your fingers and then hum. Mmm, like that. And you can hear the hum kind of rattle in your head. You really hear it inside of your head as opposed to this directional sound that's coming into your ears. It's almost like this is coming from inside of your body and then spreading outwards out of your body. You just can't get away from. You just can't get it out of your head. And so I kind of wipe the sleep out of my eyes and I look up and there's just this incredibly bright light just beaming down directly on top of us. So bright that it was obscuring not only its own shape, but I couldn't really see anything around me. I couldn't really see any of the trees. I could barely even see, like, my car that was parked like 20ft away. Like whenever you come out of, like an operation, you know, you get out of the anesthesia cloud and you have those. It's like this big center bright light. And then like a few lights kind of scattered, lining the center light, kind of like an overhead fixture like they'd see in, like a hospital. But it was just massive. And I could tell it was massive because it was burning with like the same ferocity of like an overhead lamp. Like direct, like, you know, a foot over your face. But it was clear that whatever this was was maybe a couple hundred feet in the air. So just tons and tons of light, like bright, hot, yellow light beaming down on us. Whatever it was, knew that we were there. And it was still nighttime. And I actually. I could see like a rough circular outline. But because the light was just so bright and directed in, like in our eyes, it's just really hard to tell what exactly it was the whole time. It's just hovering there, beaming down on us and, you know, just vibrating and emitting this resonant frequency. And I recall after everybody woke up, it was just very silent. You know, we weren't screaming, like when the raccoon had gotten in the tent. We were just all laying there silently looking up at it, like, transfixed. At this beaming light that was pointed down at us. I didn't recall feeling this way, but one of my friends on the trip had said that he felt, like, almost hypnotized by it. Like he was, like it was, like, pulling him up and like he was floating, though obviously nobody left the ground. But just, like, the feeling like his energy was being, like, pulled upwards. I could see just because of, like, the blocking out of, like, the stars and the constellations, that it was probably the length of, like, a school bus, I would say. So it was quite large, but it was. It was a circle, too. That's another kind of thing that felt kind of incredulous was that this particular craft kind of looked like a lot of the UFOs that I'd seen, you know, in media in my childhood. But it was unmistakably circular. It did not look like it was spinning or rotating. It just looked like it was like this static hovering object over us. It didn't look like it was tilting due to, like, balancing issues, you know, like a helicopter would. It was just perfectly static, floating in the air, like, weightless, basically. But it was massive. The lights seemed to take up most of, if not all of the surface area of the underneath of the craft, which I assume what we were looking at was the underneath of the craft. But again, just due to the. The bright directional lights, I could only really make out just the general shape and the size of looked to be pure black. Now, whether it was the material was black or it was, you know, refracting the light around it, like, almost like cloaking. Who's to say it looked like solid material. It didn't have any sort of shine like metal would. Almost like there's this artificial color black called vantablack. It's the blackest black that there is. So it looked like it wasn't even really registering the light, just no reflection of the light at all. I remember feeling just like a huge knot in my chest of dread, like, not knowing what it was going to do, whether or not we were going to be okay. I remember thinking, like. Thinking like, are we about to be abducted? Like, are we going to be, like, pulled into, like, a tractor beam or whatnot? So that's why it was really interesting when one of the other people there was saying that they felt like they were floating, looking at it, like, almost, like, hypnotically. But I remember just laying there in paralyzed fear, knowing that we were at the mercy of it. It knew we were there and at this point could do whatever it wanted with us. We had no cell service. We couldn't call anybody. I'm not even sure we would have had time to do anything. We just were. I remember just laying there paralyzed in fear, just, like, looking at it silently. We just sat there all transfixed in complete silence at this thing that was floating up over us. And eventually, after maybe a minute of it just hovering over us, it just slowly just floated away. As it started to move away from it, it almost felt like it had turned off the hypnotic qualities of the light. It noticeably got quieter immediately as it started to move, so it was almost like it was beaming something at us. And then once, when it deemed whatever it was doing, like, the task to be complete, then it turned off the hypnotic feeling of what it was doing. It didn't look like the beam was still even present at all when it started to move away again. When I said, it kind of just, like, turned it all off or, like, at least, like, turned down the light and turned down the resonant frequency. To go from experiencing something that is so inescapably loud to fading out, like, at the end of a song. It was. It was pretty mind blowing that all that happened in the span of maybe 20 seconds to where it was directly over us. And then it was completely out of sight in sound about 20 seconds. But it didn't look like it was. It didn't, like, blast off or. You know, I've seen the footage of UFOs where they will change direction and, you know, zip off at, like, unfathomable speeds. This one just seemed to kind of take its time and just move away at that point. I. As crazy as it is to say, but I think we all just kind of went back to sleep. We all, like, made sure everyone was okay. The guy that brought the hot Cheetos into the tent slept through this whole thing. I don't know how he did, but at that point, I think he'd woken up and just like, what. What was happening, you guys? I heard something going on, which is. Which is absurd. But, yeah, I also remember there not being any sort of noise, any sort of crickets. I couldn't even hear the creek that was next to us. It was almost just like this thing had just sucked up all the noise out of the environment. Even after it was long gone. It was just a completely dead night.
- [19:39]
Jack Wagner
All right, we'll be right back after this quick break. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Mental health awareness is growing, but there's still progress to be made. 26% of Americans who participated in A recent survey say that they have avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment. When people hesitate to get help, it doesn't just affect them, it impacts families, workplaces and entire communities. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. Let's encourage everyone to take care of their well being and break the stigma. BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of over 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com otherworld to get 10% off your first month. Month that's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com otherworld.
- [20:46]
David
Hey, it's Morgan Absher and I'm Kayla Moore and we're the hosts of the Crime House original podcast Clues. Every Wednesday, we sneak past the crime scene tape and open a new case file for some of the most gripping true crime cases. While Kailyn pieces together the timelines and breaks down the hard facts of these cases, I'll be diving into the theories and pulling at the threads. And that may or may not add up. From serial killers to shocking murders, Clues dives into all the forensic details and brilliant sleuthing that went into the world's most infamous cases. These clues shine a light on stories that have been waiting, sometimes for decades, to finally be heard. So join us as we open a case and uncover the breakthroughs, the heartbreak, and the relentless pursuit of answers behind these unforgettable investigations. Follow and listen to Clues, an Odyssey Podcast in partnership with Crime House. Available now on the free Odyssey app. And wherever you get your podcasts, Lowe's knows to bring your vision to life. It's important to find the right color. That's why Mylo's Rewards members get a free paint or exterior stain sample to test your look and find the perfect color to confidently refresh your space. Lowes we help you save Offer Valid in store only 58 through 5 14. Limit one per customer while supplies last. Discount taken at time of purchase. See Associate for details Programs subject to terms and conditions details@lowe's.com terms subject to change this episode is brought to you by Indeed, when your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use indeed sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply.
- [22:38]
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- [23:16]
David
We woke up the next day. Everything was where it was in the campgrounds. Like, nothing was blown away or out of the ordinary. You know, our cars were still there. I even noticed that the trash bag that we'd hung up had been completely untouched by any sort of wildlife when the previous night we had tied up the trash can and the raccoons had torn it to shreds. So it wasn't like we had done a spectacular job of tidying up, but just whatever. Yeah, nothing was disturbed at our campgrounds. It was almost like there wasn't even any wildlife around us in the first place. I was anticipating some sort of earringing. Like, you know, my. I was fortunate enough to have a childhood where my parents really valued, like, music and live music, and they. So they took me to concerts all the time when I was a kid. And the next day after a show, my ears would always be ringing. You know, we didn't wear earplugs at the time, so ears would always be ringing. This no ringing in the ears whatsoever. It was almost like it never had happened. My hearing was perfectly fine. It should have been affected and impacted. I've noticed tinnitus from way quieter things. And yeah, this did not cause any sort of damage to my ears. We just silently packed up, just all the gear and whatnot, and then we went home. We never really talked about it until, like, a few years later when we were all, like, hanging out at, like, a party or something like that. And then we were sharing stories and whatnot. And then one of the guys brought it up and said, guys, remember we saw that UFO on the camping trip in Ojai. And I just remember a kind of a hush falling over the friend group, which was uncharacteristic because myself and my friends are pretty loud and, you know, when you're, you know, telling stories together, we're pretty boisterous and laughing and whatnot and, like, yelling over each other. So I just remember everybody just kind of exchanging glances as if to say, like, oh, shoot, like, you guys remember that, too. It wasn't just me, you know, it was, it was a really sobering moment because I think all of us realized that what we had actually witnessed was actually reality. It was unexplainable, but it was certainly something that we had witnessed and we could no longer write it off as just a dream or something else that would be more easily explained. We never really got into the specifics of it. I think we were talked about the noise and the lights and whatnot, and we all concurred that we had witnessed the same things. We never really talked about it in detail, which I think we should at this point. But yeah, we definitely agreed on the overall details of the ufo. But I do remember one detail that my friend felt like he was having this out of body experience, especially when looking at the lights and hearing the resonant frequency. But he just felt like his body was floating up. And then once when the aircraft started moving away and we were no longer like in its trance, he remembered like falling quickly back down to earth, almost like somebody dropped him from like 8ft above and just he hit the ground. Like he said you could feel the force of his self like hitting the ground. I think it wasn't really awkward. I would say maybe the reason why we didn't really talk about it or address it was because I don't really think we're naturally superstitious people or like, I guess we weren't at the time either. I also think it's maybe just the tendencies of teenage guys to not really talk about things, especially pretty traumatic things like that. This encounter definitely did traumatize a couple of the guys that were also on the trip. I personally don't have any sort of resulting trauma from it, but it was never like discussed as like, wow, wasn't that crazy? Wasn't that cool? It was always a, yeah, that was really messed up. What was that? We don't really know what that was. Also, some of the guys on the trip are, were pretty religious at the time. I'm not personally religious, I've never really been religious at all. So witnessing that didn't really shake my belief systems. But I'd imagine that the guys who were pretty religious might have had trouble coping with it, really. I didn't tell my parents either. Had I told my parents, I don't think they would have believed me. They were naturally pretty rational people, I guess you could say so I think they would have just assumed that I was like, you know, smoking too much weed or whatever or whatnot. I don't think they would have believed me at all. After that happened, I was trying to rack my head about like, what that could have been besides, you know, a ufo. And I thought it could have been a helicopter, but I could tell that it was a couple hundred feet off the ground. And normally, you know, I live in the Bay Area in Oakland, and there's police helicopters flying around all the time and those fly pretty high up in the air, but you can still hear the chopper blades, you know, slicing through the air. And I'd imagine that if a helicopter is pretty low to the ground, it would be still disturbing the wind around us. And I recall just no sound coming out of the craft other than just the resonant frequency that it was emitting. There's no sort of sound that it was jet propulsion or whatever. You know, in a weird way I just remember how silent everything else was around us. There was like no sound of coyotes howling or any sort of disturbances to like, the nature around us. It was a pretty rundown campsite. So it didn't have any like, any really amenities. It barely had plumbing, just like some outhouses. So there's no machine or like machinery around there or like construction happening. There's nothing that could actually really produce a noise like that, let alone a noise at that scale. And that's why I was so like entranced when I first woke up to see this craft overhead was because I, even in my, you know, half asleep, half awake, stupor, like I knew that what it was, was not an organic thing. It wasn't of planet Earth. There's no way it could have been a helicopter. It was this complete, like otherworldly entity that was present in our, like, our space. I had just never heard any sort of noise like that ever in my lifetime. Up until that point. It just had the characteristics of nothing that I'd ever heard of. I'll never forget that noise. It's hard to describe, but I just, I'll never forget that feeling of witnessing something that was just completely beyond the scope of my understanding, even now as an adult, let alone as like a 16 year old kid. After that I had a pretty, you know, continuing on my pretty normal high school experience. My parents were always big about me getting in it, you know, higher education. So I went to college in the central coast of California. I got an engineering degree, graduated, met my wife there. You know, pretty run of the mill experience for a young upwardly mobile person. I guess after everything I just proceeded to move on with my life, graduated, got a job, moved in with my girlfriend from college. And just carried on as usual. All that really changed in 2019. So about seven or eight years later, after my encounter with the UFO, I was going on a trip with some friends from college. At that point I had graduated and we were going on a trip to Palm Springs. It was the day that we were flying into Palm Springs and my girlfriend said, hey, I'd love to do this really cool thing. It's called a sound bath. It's this meditative experience. And they have a sound bath like out in Joshua Tree. So I'd really love to do that before we go meet up with everybody at the Airbnb. And I think I was just too fixated on like partying with my friends that I was just like, didn't really think anything of it. I was just like, yeah, yeah, sure, we can go do that. I kind of was just thinking like, this is just some kind of new age woo woo bullshit. But yeah, I'll do it. You know, my girlfriend wants to do it. Let's go. So we drive to the outskirts of Joshua Tree. I remember about it was over an hour drive from the, the Palm Springs airport to this place. And the place we go to is called the Integratron. So we get to this place, it's like this. It's out in the middle of the desert. There's like a few derelict gas stations, but it's really in the outskirts of the Mojave. We get to this little kind of ranch or area. And in the middle of the ranch there's this massive building. It's like maybe 30, 40ft tall. It's two stories and it has this massive white dome over it. And that is what is called the Integratron. And that's where the sound bath took place. So we get into the building and we walk up the stairs into the second floor of the Integratron. So we're in the dome of the Integratron and we're all oriented in a circle. We're given blankets and pillows to lie down. It's just a complete meditative experience. And you close your eyes and then the person that's leading the sound experience has these massive quartz bowls that they are, you know, rubbing the rim with like a wand or something to generate a frequency. So I'm laying there with my eyes closed and the person leading the meditation starts rubbing the rims of the quartz bowls with this wand. And I was taken aback because I immediately recognized that frequency as the same exact frequency that was generated by the UFO that I experienced all those Years prior, it was unmistakable. I will never forget that sound. And I knew right away that it was the same exact frequency, you know, the same exact sensation of feeling like the sound had like permeated my bones and like my head, you know, I could feel it in my spine, like rattling all of my joints. Another interesting detail about the integratron is that it is acoustically perfect. So it's the parabolic nature of the, the dome makes it so that on the edges of, of the walls where we were all laying down is like the frequency hotspots. So this, the frequencies generated by the quartz bowls were being amplified off of the walls. And so that definitely contributed to the overall intensity of the frequency. After a while, almost again, like, like anesthesia, I unknowingly just kind of slipped out of consciousness. I think it was the only time of my life that I've truly had an out of body experience where I felt like I was no longer in my physical vessel. And I remember what accentuated this was that like, kind of towards the end, it was like an hour long, this whole experience, it felt like ages, it felt like a day. I was in this kind of stasis, you know, entranced by the frequencies of the quartz bowls. And I recall somebody else that was doing the sound bath, not part of our party, but just some other guy had fallen asleep and then started like audibly like snoring. And the snore completely took me out of the experience. But the reason I bring this up is that when I hear that initial snore again, it felt like my body just came crashing down to earth. Like I was floating 10ft above the air and then someone just dropped me and I just like slammed back into my body. I could like, like my friend had said when he was witnessing the ufo and the feeling of like falling back down to Earth, like, like, almost like your spirit is now being influenced by gravity. It was now back under the influence of gravity, the same kind of accelerating, this wham of just smacking into the floor. But again, my body had never left the floor. It was like truly transcendental. I'll never forget that, that feeling. But, but my main takeaway from that was it was the exact same frequency as the ufo. And also similar to the previous UFO experience was that I went into the sound bath experience equally as, you know, as non believing, you know, kind of with an attitude of like, ah, yeah, what it would, it's just a meditation. Okay, whatever. It's not really gonna do anything like. But then I had this incredibly impactful experience. Same thing with the camping trip. I didn't think UFOs even existed, let alone did I think that I was going to encounter one on that trip. But then, lo and behold, that's what happened. Hearing that sound again was really unnerving. I had previously thought that that sound was not possible to be created by a human. It was not an organic sound. But at the same time, too, it was also somewhat comforting. From that point on, I knew that whatever UFO I had seen was not antagonistic. If anything, it was just. It was like a kind of a wandering, you know, vessel that was just maybe like collecting data on humans and just happened to stumble upon us. Because the sound bath was such a peaceful and positive experience. Overall, I still think about it to this day, about just how much that impacted me too, but in a good way. And so having that experience was able to kind of demystify the UFO that I'd seen and demystify that experience as not one that's traumatic, but just one. It's just like another encounter that you would have with another creature that you're sharing space with, I guess. Like, it's like encountering like a deer. You know, it was. I mean, it was mind blowing, really. Especially when you're not actually, like, looking to piece information together and then everything fits or seems to align really well. Once again, it was very validating about this newfound perspective and belief that, you know, there is probably something out there that we don't really know about, and maybe there is a higher consciousness that we as humans can aspire to. It's made me a more spiritual person, I think, not as in, like a religious, like, spirituality, but just in a spirituality that my own being and my own consciousness is part of a larger, you know, ecosystem. You know, I'm not the individual. I'm like a part of the collective. Especially at the time where I just graduated college, I had just started working in engineering and engineering. They're kind of the prevailing sentiments amongst a lot of people that work in this industry is all about money and aspirational wealth and career and all these things that are kind of superfluous really, in the grand scheme of things and don't really actually matter. And just having this experience, this truly kind of transcendental experience is solidified my overall feeling of just, oh, wow, we're like. We're all part of something so much bigger than ourselves. And if only we're all given the opportunity to be shown that. I feel almost grateful that I was able to experience this and to be Shown that.
- [40:19]
Jack Wagner
All right. Thank you to David for sharing his experience. I mentioned in the intro that I first met David and heard this story a while ago. And when he first told me about it, I had never heard somebody attempt to describe hearing a completely new type of sound. I was amazed and horrified trying to imagine the feeling of not only hearing this sound in your ears, but also in your body, the feeling of it resonating and reverberating throughout you. It helped that David is a musician and can recognize and describe the specific aspects of this sound and what made it so unique, you know? Eventually, I ended up interviewing somebody with a somewhat similar experience in an episode you've probably heard called Sawyer River Road. But at the time I spoke to David, I had never heard somebody describe something like this, and I thought it was so interesting. David's experience is quite different than the one in Sawyer River Road, especially because him and his friends also saw this craft up in the sky. However, what made me most fascinated by the story was that David eventually ends up being taken to this sound bath years later by his girlfriend at the time, and he hears this certain frequency that gives him flashbacks to the terrifying experience he had as a teenager. He told me that it was the first time he had heard a sound similar to this. And then after the sound bath, he learns that this place that they were at, the Integratron, is no ordinary building. It's a structure that was meticulously crafted by an aviation engineer named George Van Tassel, who claimed to have been given the plans for the building by an extraterrestrial. It turns out the Integratron was actually intended to be more of a machine than it was a building, even though it's now currently used to do these sound baths and other events. I wanted to learn more about this, so I set out to do exactly that. And in the next episode, I will be speaking to historian Daniel Paul about the Integratron and the life of George Van Tassel. I am so glad that I met Daniel. It turns out he actually wrote the National Register of Historic Places landmark application for the Integratron and is the expert on this building. Not only that, after my conversation with Daniel, he ended up setting me out on a bit of a side quest related to the life of George Van Tassel, a side quest that is currently ongoing in some ways. You'll be hearing about all of that very soon, so stay tuned for the next episode. For now, that brings us to the end of this one. Thank you once again to David for sharing his experience. This has been episode 122. The title is the Hum Over Ojai and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans. This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaeffer. Our associate producers are Nikki Kate Delgado and Haley Pearson. Our artwork is by Culdesac Studios. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you can become a patron@patreon.com Otherworld Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five star review and telling your friends about the show. Our social media is theworldpod. Thank you to the team at Odyssey. Leah Rhys Dennis, Rob Mirandi, Eric Donnelly, Maura Curran, Kate Rose, Colin Gaynor, Michael Lavey, Josephina Francis and Hilary Shuff. Follow and listen to Otherworld now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. And finally, if you or somebody you know has experienced something paranormal, supernatural or unexplained, you can send us your story@storiesotherworldpod.com.